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Memoirs & Diaries - In a Billet

There are many Tommies who
will tell you that the average French peasant would not move a hand's turn
to ease the lot of the British soldier, but this is what happened to me.

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I had a workable knowledge
of French, and so it became my job to go on ahead of the battalion and help
to find billets. We were coming out of the line to a small village
called Famechon in the winter of 1916-17. The billeting party of one
officer and five more "other ranks" arrived at the village, and set out in
parties to find the possibilities of the place. I knocked at the door
of one cottage that stood in the comer of a small field, and an old woman
came to the door.

It would be very hard to
describe her, for she was bent, wrinkled, and her tousled hair and toothless
gums gave her the appearance of a witch. She was more like one of
Macbeth's witches than any that I have ever seen on the stage. Her
appearance almost repelled me, and more out of custom than from any other
motive I asked if she had any accommodation.

She looked at me very
keenly for a moment and then said, "'I have a spare bed." "For an
officer?" "An officer, ah no! My son used to sleep on straw. You
can have his bed, but no officer shall ever sleep in it."

I thought she must have
some bee in her bonnet on the matter of officers, so I bade her adieu and
went on with the rest of my job. I found that we had beds enough
without troubling the old woman, so I wangled that particular bed for
myself. Any bed before a barn was a working motto in those bitter
days.

The first evening I was
there she asked me all the particulars she could think of. She wanted
to know my name, age, next of kin, and so on, until I thought her the limit
in being inquisitive. Then she took me into the family, for she
addressed me as "mon garcon" and used the familiar "tu" in place of "vous".
To carry on the comedy, I often called her, "ma mere," and she seemed to
like that mode of address.

She had one peculiar habit.
She often opened a black snuff-box and took a very liberal pinch. When
I teased her about it, she merely shrugged her shoulders and said it was
"Bon pour la tete."

The second night, as I sat
near the stove, I shivered ever so slightly. Her quick black eyes saw
it. "Thou art chilled, my son," she said. "It's nothing," I remarked.
"Nothing? I can see by thy eyes that thou art ill. Get thee to bed."

"Not yet," I mumbled.
"Not yet? Do as I bid thee," and she turned on me like a fury. She
knew I was ill. She thought so at first, and she was sure now. I
was a fool to sit up near the stove. My place was in bed, and so on.
More to humour her, I went to bed.

It did not seem more than
two minutes after I was in bed before she came into the bedroom with a great
bowl full of boiled milk. "It is for thee," she said, by way of
explanation. "Drink it."

Protests were useless, and
I had to drink it whilst she stood over me, looking like a veritable witch.
I slept that night bathed in perspiration, and woke to find that she had
sent word to the M.O., and he was standing over me, feeling my pulse.
I was ill and had to stay in bed. Pills were sent round per the
orderly.

"Didn't I tell thee?" said
the old crone. "Now stay where thou art and do as I tell thee."

Bowl after bowl of boiled
milk she brought to me, until I seemed to be drinking all the yield of her
solitary cow. I loathed the sight of her milk. She busied
herself on my behalf, and I could hear the patter of her wooden sabots on
the tiled floor as she went about some household tasks.

Often I would see her
looking at me with a very strange look on her old wrinkled face, and on the
last day of our "rest" I was allowed to get up. It was then that the
M.O. told me how ill I had been. I had just missed pneumonia. If
I had not had a bed I should have been sent to the Field Ambulance, and I
remembered a pneumonia case that died two cots from mine in the Field
Ambulance.

"Ma mere," I said to the
old woman, "I have been very grateful for all that you have done for me.
How much shall I give you to repay you for your work and worry?"

She took my great rough
hand in both of hers, and with a look of inestimable charm that her wrinkles
could not efface she looked up into my face and smiled.

"My boy," she said, "thou
art such another as the son I had, but whom the good God thought fit to take
from me. Thou art of his form and almost of his face. Thou art
of his age, too. Sometimes I have prayed that the Blessed Virgin might
send him back to me, but that thou knowest is impossible. She sent
thee to me when thou hadst most need of a mother, and for these last few
days I have been with a son of my own again. Talk not to me of
repayment. I will tell thee what thou mayst do for me. Buy no
more than quatre sous' worth of snuff, for a pinch is good for the head."

I listened with tears in my
eyes as she told me this, and I do not think I shamed my manhood by them.
I felt ashamed to think that I, as big as a bull compared with her, should
not have a heart as big as a pea, whilst in her poor, shrunken form was a
heart as big as a drum.

C.Q.M.S. Harry Drake
enlisted September 9th, 1914, in the 16th West Yorks Regt. (Bradford "Pals"
Battalion). Served with the battalion as corporal, sergeant, C.Q.M.S.,
and A/R.Q.M.S. in Egypt and France. Upon the reorganization of
brigades in 1918, he was posted as A/R.Q.M.S. to the 3rd Entrenching
Battalion. In March of 1918 he was reposted as C.Q.M.S. in the 15th
West Yorkshire Regt.; he was demobilized in February 1919.